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Artifacts in Research Process

The term research artifacts refers to the systematic biases, uncontrolled and unintentional, that can threaten the INTERNAL or EXTERNAL VALIDITY of one's research conclusions. The potential for research artifacts in social science research exists because human participants are sentient, active organisms rather than passive, inactive objects. As such, the interactions between the researcher and the agents of study can potentially alter the experimental situation in subtle ways unintended by the researcher.

The potential problems that research artifacts may cause in social science research were evident in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, a controversial series of studies conducted at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Illinois during the 1920s was interpreted as implying that simply observing someone's behavior is sufficient to alter that person's behavior. Earlier, the work of the eminent German psychologist Oskar Pfungst (1911/1965), involving a horse named “Clever Hans,” at the turn of the century dramatically demonstrated how an individual's expectations could unconsciously influence another's behavior. In another classic work, Saul Rosenzweig (1933) argued that the experimental situation should be considered a psychological problem in its own right. He suggested that one must consider the possibility that the attitudes and motivations of the experimenter and research participant can subtly influence the research situation. Despite these warning signs of the potential problem of research artifacts, it was not until the late 1950s and 1960s that this problem and its ramifications for social science research were systematically investigated. This research, which was first pulled together in a volume edited by Rosenthal and Rosnow (1969), has commonly focused on two potential sources of research artifacts: the researcher and the research participant.

RESEARCHER-RELATED ARTIFACTS

Because researchers are not passive, disinterested participants in the scientific process, they can sometimes unknowingly or unwittingly engage in behaviors that introduce an artifact into the research design. Robert Rosenthal (1966), in a seminal book, defined two broad types of researcher-related artifacts as noninteractional and interactional artifacts. Noninteractional artifacts are biases that do not actually affect the research participants' behavior. Rather, they are systematic biases in how the researcher observes, interprets, or reports the research results. For example, the observations the researcher makes may be biased in a manner that increases the likelihood that the researcher's hypotheses will be supported. Similarly, how the researcher interprets the data may be biased in the direction of supporting the hypotheses of interest. Although these two types of noninteractional biases may be unintentional, a third type is clearly intentional. The researcher may fabricate or fraudulently manipulate data to manufacture support for his or her hypotheses, which is clearly unethical.

The second category of researcher-related artifacts is associated with the interaction between the researcher and the research participants. For example, various biosocial characteristics of the researcher (such as ethnicity, sex, and age) have the potential to influence the participants' behavior in an unintended manner. Likewise, psychosocial attributes of the researcher (such as personality) may lead participants to respond in a manner ostensibly unrelated to the factors under investigation. Situational effects (such as changes in the researcher's behavior during the course of the study) can alter the manner in which individuals respond to the experimental stimuli. Finally, as Rosenthal (1966) demonstrated, even the simple knowledge of one's hypotheses can influence the researcher's behavior, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy or experimenter expectancy bias, which is by far the most thoroughly investigated source of interactional artifacts.

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